Thus he knew the man who was to counterbalance his favour at the Court of Berlin and one day share with him Frederick’s Government, the Saxon Bischoffswerder. The son of a small noble, an officer of fortune, come like so many others to seek service in Prussia, he had wormed his way into the favour of the Prince-Royal, and had quickly taken him in.

XIII.

Mistresses and favourites, Rosicrucians and valets, theosophists and femmes galantes, on the whole got on very well together and agreed surprisingly. It was but a step from the laboratory of the Rosicrucians to the boudoir of Madame Rietz, and these mystic personages cleared it without a scrap of shame. They formed a close alliance with the valet de chambre and his wife, the maîtresse d’habitude, who throughout all the matrimonial pranks of the King managed to preserve her credit by artifices analogous to those which at Versailles had so long maintained that of Madame de Pompadour.

Around them swarmed a crowd of subordinate intriguers, the “clique,” as they were called in Berlin, ready for all sorts of jobs behind the scenes at Court, in the Army, in politics, in diplomacy—above all, in finance. Needy and greedy, they had a firmly established reputation in Europe for venality. “I maintain,” declared Mirabeau, “that with a thousand louis you could, if need be, know perfectly all the secrets of the Berlin Cabinet.... So the Emperor has a faithful record of every step of the King, day by day, and could know everything he planned, if he planned anything.” These were the methods, as Custine affirmed in 1792, that every diplomatist in the world employed; all the Ministers who resided in Berlin used them with more success and more generally than elsewhere.

XIV.

Such was the strange band of adventurers who pounced on the monarchy and the treasury of Frederick the Great. Their course of action, very complex and very powerful, was well designed to captivate a fantastic and voluptuous bigot. However, they would never have gained more than an antechamber or alcove influence, they would never have risen to political influence, had they not known how to pervert the noblest inclinations of the King, whilst flattering the lowest. Mediocre and secondary as was his place in the line of the Hohenzollerns, Frederick William was not devoid of all royal qualities. He was brave, he was kind-hearted, or rather he was a man of “sensibility”; he desired the public weal; he had suffered, like the nation, from the pitiless régime of Frederick; like the whole nation, he wanted to reform the State by lightening the yoke. He believed himself inspired from on high, “illumined,” and called by Providence to restore the morals and faith of a country which, he was told, and he himself believed, was perishing through the scepticism of men’s minds and the looseness of men’s morals.

How could he combine such tendencies with such tastes, such aspirations with such passions, such beliefs with such debauchery? It was just therein that he showed himself a weak character and a mystic; that was why he joined theurgic sects instead of submitting to the Church; why he believed in visions more than in the Gospel, listened to a ventriloquist mimicking the voice of Frederick instead of listening to the voices of the Ministers, the great King’s disciples; that is why he distrusted wise, thoughtful, experienced people and surrendered himself to charlatans and favourites.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND

BY THE SAME AUTHOR